I tend to be a bit wary of vendor surveys of technology trends - they tend to be self serving in the scope of industries/countries they cover. But when I saw this TCS study of Big Data at over 1,200 companies I glanced through it.

It's nicely done with more of a payback, opportunity and challenge focus by industry, process and geography, not a HANA this and Hadoop that discussion.

Some of the findings:

"Four industries -- telecom, travel-related, high tech, and
banking/fi nancial services – told us they spend much more than the median on Big Data. So what
do these industries have in common? For one, they have high numbers of customer
interactions (especially online). In addition, according to our data, three of them
generate higher than average percentages of revenue from Internet orders."

"US, India,
UK
and Mexican Companies are More Likely to Have Big Data Initiatives"

"On the dimension of structure, 55% of leaders’ data is
unstructured or semi-structured vs. 45% of laggards. And 37% of leaders’
data is external vs. internal. For laggards, that percentage is 26%."

"The eight most highly rated functional activities are:

Identifying
customers with the most potential or actual value (sales)

Monitoring
product quality (R&D)

Monitoring
product shipments (logistics)

Identifying
customer needs for new products and product enhancements (R&D)

I found myself in Palm Springs, CA last week, and it is a marvel of greenery in the middle of the harsh desert. While people criticize it for being wasteful with over 100 golf courses in the vicinity, you have to admire how the Desert Water Agency there has kept the water flow going for decades.

The New Florence blog is a similar innovation oasis in the midst of so much wasteful technology spend. Through April, I have posted 262 innovation entries this year. At that
pace, I could beat last year's run of 750. Not likely given my book and
other commitments this year, but the DWA is pretty inspiring in its long haul track record.

In two seperate venues this week I saw Oracle execs, Thomas Kurian
(in front of customers) and Steve Miranda (in front of analysts)
passionately and articulately talk about cloud computing.

Thomas talked about the speed clouds bring citing a Herbalife 10,000+
employee Fusion HRM project which from contract signing to live took 5
weeks including the intervening Christmas break. He talked about the 4
upgrade releases a year as another indication of agility that comes from
a cloud solution. He talked about shared service efficiencies in the
cloud - supporting 4,800 database customers with just 6 employees.

Steve talked about the robustness of the Fusion products to support
over 100,000 employees at Schneider Electric and comprehensiveness of
Fusion for multi-currency accounting and global tax and stautory
reporting.

And while Oracle gets maligned for the slow Fusion
rollout or being late to the cloud infrastructure market, Steve is
content Oracle is on a $ 1 billion a year cloud run rate (helped by
acquisitions like RightNow, Taleo, Eloqua and others). Thomas says the
IaaS market is still young - Amazon has barely generated lifetime
revenues of $ 1 billion from AWS.

But unlike other cloud vendor executives, they just as stoutly defend
on-premise computing and private networks and Oracle's continued
support for Sun gear, PeopleSoft, Siebel and other products. It's the
customer's choice, they keep saying.

Listening to them it hit me that Ashton Eaton, winner of the 2012
Olympics decathlon, could probably give Usain Bolt a run for the money
if he only ran the 100 and 200 metres but he prefers to compete in a
wider set of events.

It reminded me of Alfred Sloan who took GM in a very different
direction in the 1920s as he segmented the market with "a car for every
purse and purpose" against Ford which stuck to its single Model T model.

I did ask Thomas how Oracle's cloud would be insulated from the
"innovator's dillemma" that has plagued cloud offerings at SAP, IBM and
other large vendors.

He says their cloud is more comprehensive.
They are the only vendor to offer SaaS, PaaS and IaaS = building
consensus across Oracle. They have not gone down market with their cloud
offerings. And finally, their CEO has been an early cloud fan (and an early
investor in Salesforce and NetSuite)

Many analysts would prefer
Oracle put its full weight behind the cloud. I guess it is important to
remember while Usain gets plenty of buzz, it is Ashton who holds the
title of "world's greatest athlete" the title traditionally reserved for
Olympic decathlon winners.

Last year Oracle’s events team invited me to describe some of the better events I had been to (and that I blogged about here). They heard me compliment a couple like Cognizant Community for its focus on thought leadership more than product marketing, for its location and for its executive audience.

Not sure if that inspired Oracle but their Global Leadership Summit today in Palm Springs raised the bar a few notches

a) the locale was spectacular – Porcupine Creek in Palm Springs the agenda was mostly thought leadership – President Bill Clinton (see my detailed note here), Dr. Laura D’Andrea Tyson (a key player in Clinton and Obama administrations and now professor at Haas at UC Berkeley), Larry Leibowitz and Bruce Lee, President and CIO at NYSE Euronext. The only Oracle executive to speak on its products was Thomas Kurian, though Mark Hurd and Bob Evans hosted the event.

c) the audience was senior and global (at lunch I sat with executives from Italy, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and Argentina)

Jon Swartz has a nice column in USA Today to time with Inforum in Orlando today. Of course, he plays to his consumery audience and presents gossipy elements of the relationship with Oracle and Larry Ellison (‘the irony is delicious”), the nice new NY HQ digs and UI and social aspects of the software.

If he had been at the keynote this morning he would have likely focused on the nice coliseum type seating, the bright red Infor logos contrasted with white couches, the drop down display screens and other nice aesthetic elements inspired by Infor’s in house creative agency, Hook and Loop.

He does not focus on a really interesting aspect of Infor’s revival - a relentless focus on “micro verticals”. They briefed us about them in New York earlier this year, and they are visible in the hallways here and got significant play in the keynote. “The Equipment Cloud” got a special mention and builds on Infor’s strong enterprise asset management (see my post about the complex implementation at the collider at CERN), dealer service management functionality (developed with Caterpillar’s channels) and ION interfaces to a number of custom operational applications.

Another exciting announcement is the SkyVault which leverages Amazon’s cloud based Big Data engine Redshift. In a Q&A, Charles Phillips invoked his Oracle background and said “I have had a chance to work with some of the best database engineers in the world”, and expressed amazement Amazon is able to provide massively parallelized, columnar storage and compression at just “$0.85 per hour for a single node 2TB data warehouse”

If you superimpose micro-vertical focus with affordable analytical compute power, you start to see high-payback operational and customer centric intelligence. The pervasive feeling at Inforum is a proud focus on business applications and industry specific features and functions. Oh, there is mandatory cloud, social, mobile talk, but the underlying functional focus is refreshing compared to all noise from the competition.

That to me is far more exciting than Charles telling Jon there are no bean bags in the Flatiron neighborhood HQ.

Upfront a confession - my wife has long accused me of planning the next vacation instead of enjoying the one we are on.

So, I don't blame SAP co-CEOs Jim Snabe ( as he does with Dennis Howlett here) or Bill McDermott (as he does with Jim Cramer here and the Washington Post here) for constantly talking about cloud, analytical, mobile products which make up just 1, 2, 3% of SAP revenues. They cannot wait for them to become 10, 15, 30% products.

Ditto with IBM. Notice how in every commercial they talk about advanced analytics or smart cities, and their employees say "that's what I am working on". The poor souls who generate 90% of IBM revenues via DB2, Tivoli, Notes, SAP projects, data centers, deskside support, accounting BPO etc never get to make an appearance.

As Dennis says "These are the core ‘things’ that all large businesses need in order to
develop an efficient organization. They represent the backbone functions
upon which all businesses depend and which provide the way in which
they pay and get paid for the goods and services provided."

Dennis is right. Except that between SAP, its partners, and IBM that is a $ 150 billion a year backbone burden every single year. A burden that stubbornly refuses to go down year on year. They actually come in the way of "efficient organizations".

And the key word is backbone - little of what they provide today helps companies with smarter products or with revenue creating technology. This is when IT is challenged to support front-facing, not backbone, support.

SAP and IBM are not the only ones with the lopsided revenue mix. Most large vendors have 60-70% revenues which is in that backbone category. But SAP and IBM stand out, both in the percentage of that revenue, and most definitely in their noise about the "new" stuff.

Frankly, I would be more impressed to hear from SAP and IBM how they are using Six Sigma, Agile, CMM5, better ecosystem management etc to make their "utilities" more affordable and efficient. Innovation is not just about talking about cool new stuff, it is also about dramatic improvements to current products and processes. And they can see internally what significant efficiencies are being delivered via their new cloud and mobile technologies.

And you what, magically. as the cost of their older utilities goes down, their newer products they keep talking about will go from 1,2,3% of revenue to 5,10,15%. Their reality will catch up to their future talk.

But no - that's boring stuff you don't want to bother Bill or Ginni with or they would rather talk about.

I am a big fan of crowdsourcing done right. GE's use of Kaggle's crowd to solve complex aviation challenges, or the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk for crowd scans of satellite imagery in the search for Jim Gray are two good examples.

This week, however, we have seen two controversial examples of crowdsourcing.

First, the Masters in Augusta last weekend used viewer called-in information to assess Tiger Woods a 2 stroke penalty for a rule violation. Bubba
Watson, last year's winner, reacted for many: "Nobody calls in during a
basketball game or a football game. ... They're definitely not calling
balls and strikes during a baseball game." Crowdsourced referees are suspect - they may not like Tiger or Bubba. That's why we have paid officiating.

Far more concerning was the crowdsourced sleuthing of the Boston bombing (far ahead of the FBI releasing the photographs of the suspects on Wednesday). An example of the crowd identified "suspects" was on this album. One of the suspects, according to the Associated Press was a "high school student, of Moroccan descent, said he is scared to go
outside after he was portrayed on the Internet and on the front page of
the New York Post as connected to the deadly Boston Marathon bombings."

My own reaction when I saw those photos was the law often issues "disinformation" early on in an investigation - so the crowd was
primarily looking for backpacks with sags (due to a heavy bomb), hoodies, primarily on Boylston street, brown folks. For two whole days, the crowd tried to identify suspects based on a limited number of photos from amateur cameras used at the Marathon and the Boston Police scanner live stream, whereas the law enforcement had access to a far bigger evidentiary database of store, police and other videos and first-hand witness interviews in addition. Sure enough this crowd did not even know about the Tsarnaev brothers till the FBI released their photos.

The week in Boston will be analyzed from countless perspectives in the coming months. I hope one angle looks at the opportunities and limits of crowdsourcing.